Colin Sprake on buying a business, and bringing on Y Scouts to run an executive retained search for an Chief Operating Officer
Colin Sprake bought a company called Local Handyman with a clear idea of what he did not want, which was a full-time job. He and his business partner wanted to own and grow businesses, not run the day-to-day of one, so the plan from the start was to hire someone who could take over most of the company and give them their time back to go buy and build more.
That plan only works if the person you hire is the right one, and Colin is direct about where that gets decided. It is not in the interviews, and it is not in the offer. It happens in the weeks before anyone is ever contacted, when you sit down and get painfully specific about the role you are actually trying to fill.
Most leadership searches fail before they start
When a search goes sideways, the story usually gets told as a candidate problem, and the person who did not work out becomes the explanation. In our experience the roots go back much further, to a role that was never really defined, where the company knew it needed help but never agreed on what kind of help, and so every candidate looked partly right and nobody looked clearly right.
Colin’s situation had a wrinkle that made this even harder. The person he needed was not a copy of anyone already in the business, because the work he was handing off had been split between two owners with very different personalities. As he described it, they had to find someone who was a composite of both of them, and that is not a requirement you stumble into. You only get there by doing the work of naming it.
Effort at the front end, or effort for the rest of the year
Every Y Scouts search opens with a role visioning process, where we work with the leadership team to define the role, the outcomes it owns, the values a person has to share, and the kind of leader who will actually thrive in that specific company. Some clients treat it as paperwork to get through. Colin treated it as the search itself.
“Anyone watching this needs to understand that the more effort you put in up front, the better the result is going to be at the end. I put a lot of time, effort and energy into it. In fact, I kept adding to it as we went, because if you want to throw a bullseye on a dartboard, you have to be very specific about what you need to do to make that happen. The more effort that went in up front, pretty much the less effort down the line.”
That trade is real, and it shows up in how the rest of the process feels. When the role is defined sharply, the shortlist is short, the debates are about substance rather than gut feel, and the decision at the end tends to be obvious to everyone in the room. When it is not, you spend months interviewing people while quietly arguing about what you are even hiring for.
A specialist understands the role you are describing
Colin was hiring an integrator, a role that comes out of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and that distinction mattered to him when he chose who to work with.
“The most important criteria for finding a search partner was looking for somebody who is a specialist in hiring these specific kinds of people. We were looking for an integrator, it’s an important role for us, and we had to find a company like Y Scouts that really understood that role so we could get the right person on board. A general hiring firm, or recruitment, or HR company, whatever you want to call it, I don’t think they fully understand that process.”
This is where the up-front work and the choice of partner meet. A specialist can pressure test your definition of the role, tell you when two of your requirements contradict each other, and recognize the difference between a strong operator and an operator who fits your seat. A generalist takes the job description at face value and goes looking, which is exactly the outcome Colin was trying to avoid.
Culture fit runs both directions
One thing worth noting is when Colin decided we were the right partner, because his answer was that the decision was already made before the search started.
“I don’t think we would have even started the process if we didn’t believe you were the right partner. We watched testimonials of other people who had been through it, we got to meet the team, and I think we shared similar values. Those values are important to us, because at the end of the day we’re looking for someone to join our team who’s going to match our culture. If we didn’t match the culture of Y Scouts, we probably wouldn’t have gone with you.”
If you are going to hire for values alignment, the firm helping you has to understand values the same way you do. Otherwise you are asking someone to screen for something they cannot see.
What to do before you open a search
If you are close to starting a leadership search, the most useful hour you can spend is not on job boards or firm comparisons. It is on getting honest answers to a few questions with your leadership team, starting with what specifically will be true in twelve months if this hire works, and what parts of your own job you are genuinely willing to hand over. From there you can name which decisions this person owns outright, what a candidate has to have done before versus what they can learn in your business, and which of your values would make a strong performer a bad fit anyway.
Write the answers down, then keep adding to them the way Colin did, because the document is not a formality. It is the search.
“Be very specific about what you’re looking for, understand what you’re looking for, and be very clear in the visioning process, so that you give Y Scouts the best opportunity of being successful.”
Colin Sprake is an owner of Local Handyman and partnered with Y Scouts to hire his integrator. If you are weighing a leadership hire and want to talk through what the role actually needs to be, let’s talk.
